Burnout

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2011-11-17

I have a confession to make: Other than one little stint at RubyC, I haven’t really written code in almost a month. And I haven’t really written a ‘real’ blog post in almost six weeks.

It happens. I was hitting it really hard there for a while, and the combination of stresses from travel, speaking, writing, conference parties, and everything else was really getting to me. I don’t think that I was burned out yet, but I decided to explicitly take the last two weeks off from doing almost anything to prevent myself from getting to that point.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop doing any of these things. I’d be lying if I tried to say that I’d be reintroducing long-term balance into my life. That balance never really existed. I’ve always been one to throw myself at things 100%. Balance is something I don’t do particularly well.

One thing I am going to be working on, though, is this: Hackety and Shoes stress me out. Like a lot. This causes me to avoid working on them, which makes them not improve so quickly, which makes me stress about it worse. I’m not really sure how to fix that one… but at some point, I’m going to have to confront that.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back at it soon. Those of you waiting on some of my projects, my bad. Things will still be slow for a bit. I’m going to D.C. this weekend to teach kids with Hackety and Lego Mindstorms, so maybe that’ll get me out of this funk. Or maybe it’ll delay it another couple of days.

But I’ll be around again soon.